Creationist Bumper Stickers from WorldNetDaily

You know about WorldNetDaily (WND), the flamingly creationist journalistic organ that believes in and enthusiastically promotes every conspiracy theory that ever existed. WND is an absolutely execrable, moronic, and incurably crazed publication, an instrument of idiocy, a wretched rag, a deep pool of theocratic throw-up, a sinkhole of stupid, a fountain of feculence, and most importantly, an early winner of your Curmudgeon’s Buffoon Award.

Tired of keeping quiet? Well express yourself with a little bit of humor using this bumper sticker.

Yes, don’t hold back. Go ahead and slap one of these on your car. Show the world how clever you are. Here’s more:

Make a bold statement this year — and every year. This magnetic, permanent yet removable bumper sticker measures 15 by 3-3/4 inches. It’s perfect not only for your car, but for your refrigerator, file cabinet – any magnetic surface where you would like to make a statement.

Go for it, dear reader. Buy a bunch. Put ‘em on your car, nail ‘em to your wall, display one on your desk, stick one to the headboard of your bed, greet visitors appropriately by attaching one to your front door. Put them everywhere!

You gotta admit it — you just can’t find this stuff on your own. Where would you be without your Curmudgeon?

19 responses to “Creationist Bumper Stickers from WorldNetDaily”

I don’t even understand the argument the sticker is trying to make. Of course the theory has evolved! Darwin could never have anticipated the new synthesis; in the 1850s they knew absolutely nothing about the biochemical mechanisms of inheritance. But this is a positive trait of science – theories get revised as more data is collected.

Only a complete idiot could consider scientific progress to be a negative trait.

I must admit if I could blank out the word Darwin I would be tempted to buy the sticker, it kind of then sums up two major points of the “controversy”.
1). One science can evolve, it not set in stone.
2). Most creationists seem to think science is still stuck back when in the times Newton, or Darwin, were alive, and has not made huge strides since.

eric: “I don’t even understand the argument the sticker is trying to make.”

Yeah ya do. It’s a deliberate double-entendre to fool the rubes. Note that it neatly avoids what science has evolved to. Some rubes (most WND fans) will infer YEC, the more “open minded” (as in brains fall out) types will infer the ID that in Dembski’s words “can accommodate all the results of ‘Darwinism.” Those like us, but unaware of WND’s radical anti-science agenda, might think that WND supports real science.

The astonishing thing is that, by leaving out the part that directly bears false witness, these clowns think the’re fooling God!

Well, let me put it this way Frank. If I had seen that sticker on a car and not known anything about the individual (i.e. no other stickers) or the source (WND), I would have very little idea what it was trying to say. Of course I know what its trying to say when I have the context provided by knowing its source.

Now, ironically, even not knowing the source, the sheer nonsensical-ness of the message would probably lead me to believe it was a fundie anti-reason diatribe. Because fundies (a) say a lot of weird crazy things, and (b) very often print messages on t-shirts etc. that are intended for cult insiders and are intentionally opaque to outsiders. But that’s kind of beside the point, which is that from a communicating-your-message perspective, its a pretty bad sticker.

It has a chimp on it. For the creationist, evolution=something about monkeys. Things like “random variations”, “micro- not macro-“, even the Bible, they’re all insignificant compared to the monkey thing.

It mentions Darwin. The other significant thing about evolution for the creationist being Darwin.

If it said, “Shhh … don’t tell anyone. Science has evolved” with a picture of a dinosaur, then it could be anybody’s bumper sticker.

We of course can spot the giveaways, but we’re not the one’s WND is targeting. The irony is that a few years ago I received a personal email reply from WND’s own Joseph Farah assuring me that ID and OEC are “wrong too.” Even then they were savvy enough to attack evolution only, and make it as personal as possible by never missing an opportunity to focus on Darwin, “Darwinism” and “Darwinists.” Farah only acknowled ID and OEC because I brought it up. But like AiG, Farah did not yet care that admitting that any anti-evoltion position was wrong was sacrilegious to the big tent strategy. With this sticker that might be changing.

There’s no point in buying a bumper sticker, since the vast majority of creationists project their inarguable beliefs onto science and say that it does the same thing.

What would be great is to go plastering it on the internet, whenever creationists of whatever kind attack Darwin for his Victorian notions on race and society, and his lack of knowledge of genetics, neutral evolution, and the like.

Of course it still has a fraudulent message, that somehow Darwin wouldn’t approve of science actually advancing. Well, we really can’t say that he’d be pleased at the advance of evolutionary theory, yet it seems quite unlikely that he’d see it as anything but what he intended. It’s creationism/ID that can’t stand change from “it looks designed [to a certain kind of anthropocentric prejudice], therefore it is.

Indeed, the whole point of the bumper sticker is that evolutionary theory has not moved on from Darwin, despite the fact that the fact that it has exists in thousands of reasonably accessible sites on the web. Learning being so foreign to your average creationist that it’s at least as likely that those responsible for the message are truly that ignorant as that they’re deliberately spreading a false idea.

The religious mind subsists on Argument from Authority, the corollary of which is Sacred Texts, Holy Books, divinely inspired Prophets and Holy Men, etc. Thus to the religious mind, Evolution is a religion, Darwin is its Prophet, and Darwin’s writings are its Sacred Texts.

Now, Truth is one and unchanging, so, to the religious mind, or at least the fundamentalist mind, a religion shouldn’t change. Change implies you got it wrong from the start – thus in their mind the “religion” of “Darwinism” is disproven by the “evolution” of “Darwinism”. If Darwin “got it wrong” then the whole thing is wrong, they think. They have no concept of science “getting it right” but still needing constant improvement as new data arrives.

The irony of course is that Christianity and all religions that have been around long enough have evolved and changed – in some quite dramatic ways – in spite of which the True Believer will insist that his sect has “got it right” at last, “restoring” the One True Faith of the primitive Church.

The way science actually works simply does not enter their heads; it is an alien concept. The bumper sticker is just a particularly bad example of arguments not as rational propositions, but rather arguments as slogans or war crys to identify what social group one belongs to.

The illustration works only *because* the chimp looks so human-like. The animal in the picture has to have fingers (particularly independently controllable index fingers), ears in the right place, forward-facing eyes, and a more or less human-like mouth capable of an expression that can be recognized as similar to what a human would make. It would not work with a rhinocerous or even a cat. Chimps work so well as caricatured humans you have to wonder what level of self-delusion Creationists have to reach to insist people and chimps aren’t related and even to use depictions of chimps to mock the concepts of evolution and common origin.

1. The chimp has his fingers in his ears. When a person says “sshhhh”, they put a finger to their lips. This is the “hear no evil” chimp – wouldn’t the “speak no evil” chimp, with his hand over his mouth, fit the slogan better? What are we supposed to do, plug our ears to keep from telling Darwin? Or is the chimp supposed to be Darwin.

2. There is an assumption that Darwin can be told something, and therefore we have to be quiet. What???? If he is lying in his grave listening to us, there are way more important issues involved here than the evolution of science…

3. The sticker is magnetic. Does this mean that it is marketed to buyers who are likely to change their mind? Do they swap it out with other stickers advocating other points of view, depending on where they are driving? Do they hide it from their girlfriends? Do they take it off when they get home, so their neighbors don’t know? … Maybe this works for a guy trying to attract a girl who is, among other things, a creationist. But he doesn’t want his friends at work to know…

4. By the time you read the “sshhhh”, you are waaaay too close. The “wnd.com” is only readable by a fellow driver after the accident had occurred.

I guess you also remember the big chrome bumpers that “evolved” in the ’50s into flimsy decorative chrome bumpers, then “evolved” (via Govt. mandate) back into big chrome bumpers in 1973. “Evolution” is “disproven” however, because the GTO had plastic bumpers in 1968. ;-)

My late great Saturn wagon had a plastic hatch as well, so the “Support Our Troops” magnet had to go on my wife’s car.